That's the Cornwallian village of Marazion - Skippy made this Panorama from 5 shots he took of the Town from atop the Mount of St. Michael. Marazion is Old Timey Talk for "Market Thursday," which fairly sums the history of Marazion. It's about 12 Klicks from Penzance. There were Two "Excerpt" passages supposedly rescued in the Secret Gospel of Mark. The first, you'll remember, dealt with the Neaniskos whom Jesus raised from the dead and then seemingly bedded for 6 days before "Initiating him into the Mystery of the Kingdom of God" on the 7th night by lying with him "naked man to naked man". Notice how 7 is the number of Revelation. The 2nd passage, according to Clement of Alexandria - who is presented by Morton Smith as the Sphragis figure - should be reinserted in Canonical Mark at Mark: 10:46. Before we get to the Secret Mark Passage let's get Canonical Context. Mark: 10:46 reads: "They reached Jericho; and as they left Jericho with his disciples ..." This illustrates one of those Logico-Sequentia Lacunae the Biblical Etics have been wondering and arguing about for centuries. Why would a Sacred Text, where every word and action has Meaning tell you that "They Reached Jericho" only to depart the city in the next clause? It has long been suspected that Canonical Mark was the revision of an earlier text and that there were too many places in Mark's Sacred Narrative where he felt like something had been left out. Or taken out. So the reputed First Edition of Mark, that is "Secret Mark," says to insert this Passage in the line: "And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them." So now we need to look at how that passage may relate to the first - about the Yoot who Loved Jesus and was Naked under his White Linen. And about how it relates to Morton Smith's Uranian Agenda. And how that agenda has been borrowed nearly Whole Cloth from Oscar Wilde and his most famous Play: Salomé. So the first question is whether the Salome of the 2nd Passage in Secret Mark is the same Salome in the story of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist. The Bitch of the Dance of the 7 Veils. Probably the most famous Slut in History - if you discount Mary Magdalene, as Bobby Langdon says we should.
"Salome, in early Christian literature, was a very shady lady. This one should not be confused with the Herodian princess celebrated by Oscar Wilde. The name was common." Morton Smith wrote that and Peter Jeffery uses it as an example of Smith's brilliant and balsy strategy of Overtly denying what his work is Covertly claiming. So Jeffery claims that Smith is "intentionally conflating" the two Salomes.
Click 12 for the Skinny on Marazion.
As Jeffery points out, if Morton Smith can get us to "recognized this character [of the Slut Daughter Temptress] in the Salome of the Secret Gospel, we can locate a stream of 20th Century thought in which the text fits perfectly. By making Secret Mark's Salome the Temptress Salome the entire Secret Mark Gospel brings sense to Canonical Mark by plugging lacunae.
Every one of the Etics who claim that Morton Smith's discovery of the Mar Saba Manuscript is a phony from start to finish will begrudgingly admit that the fucking thing is brilliant. In fact it's breathtaking. In its complexity and its overwhelming simplicity once the seed grows in your mind that Christianity was a Mystery Religion founded by Homosexual and/or Bisexual Men with a Carpocratian Gnostic Agenda to stem the misery of Monkey Reproduction into the Material Realm by redirecting the Sexual Impulse towards the Higher & more Spiritual Realms where such mingling is not for the purpose of birthing. Suddenly, a lot about Jesus and his life becomes understandable. If not acceptable. And that is where the Uranians want you. On the cusp of either rewriting Christianity and opening it to Gays or abandoning it the way Christian Canonical Dogma had abandoned Morton Smith, and men like him, for the past 1700 years. It's a Balsy Muthafukin' Heresy! You gotta give him that. But then that's the point the other Etics say: the Majority - who believe that Smith's discovery is not a forgery and is in fact the First Gospel of the Christian Faith - if it's not a fraud then it's not Heresy. It's Christianity today which is the Heresy. There's a lot on the line in this Game. Salome, by the way, is not named in Canonical Mark. Or in any of the Canonical Gospels - we know Herod's daughter from the Jewish Historican Josephus. The only other Salomes in the New Testament are: Jesus's Sister, his Midwife, and one of his Disciples. So Conflate away. Go ahead. Smith is counting on it. Now look at the 2nd passage again: the "Sister of the Yoot whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome." Whoa! Whose mother? The Yoot's? Or Jesus's? And what Salome is this? None of these questions can be answered of course because we are dealing with Text which has no attribution - as of yet - and which gives us no other context except itself. That's a distinction between Qualia and Quanta - Qualia refers only to itself and takes no "measurement" from the outside of that Context - so it cannot be "Proved" in anyway. It rides on our "Feelings" about the matter - precisely what Smith is using for his Sphragis. Our "Sense" that this makes Sense.
Salome is the most famous Biblical Slut of the Modern Age. Because Salome is Modern. She comes into her "Character" in the 19th Century when her kind of Sex and Violence were seething under the lid of the Modern Christian Man. Every great Character needs the Age which Creater her - as a Mirror.
Click 11 to watch the Staging.
Salome became as popular among 19th Century Artists as Mary was among artists in the Medieval. Flaubert, Mallarmé, Heinrich Heine, Gustave Moreau, all had their crack at the Expanding Myth of Herod's Little Girl Salome. And then the Man and the Myth collided in the person of Oscar Wilde, the brilliant Irish-Twit Poet and Playwright - the Age's most Renowned Bad-Boy. Oscar brought it all together: Sex, Seduction, Adultery, Murder in what he always thought was more a Gospel than a Play.
"The mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death." The Teen-Slut coos in the ear of the Baptist's severed head. In Oscar Wilde's Play Salomé the Teen-aged daughter of Herod's wife is - in Peter Jeffery's term - a "homicidal virgin." The Play itself is a "drama within a drama." Wilde wrote it in French, in Paris in 1891 while he was buggering French Symbolist Poets. It was written in French for several reasons. One was the Maeterlinck Symbolism which was bound to flow when one tried to write "Art" in a language not your own. Wonderful poetic accidents could follow. That, and Oscar was sending a message to the society which had rejected him. His lover and killer, Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas was the translator as well as the Subject of Oscar's Dedication. The 1893 English Translation caused a scandal back in Victorian England where the play could not be performed because it violated an Elizabethan-Era law forbidding any "Theatrical Representations" of Biblical Scenes, Themes, and Characters. The Law was enacted to reign in the Catholic Morality Plays, Passion Plays, and Propaganda Theater - as well as reign in the growing propensity to mock and satirize any and all Christian Memes by the Intelligentsia and the Literati. Oscar Wilde never saw his play Salomé produced. He missed the 1896 Paris Opening because he was doing Hard Time in the Reading Gaol, having been convicted of "Gross Indecency." His lover's father had accused Oscar - in print - of being a "posing Sodomite." Oscar Sued him for libel. Stupid move. During the trial it came out that Oscar liked "hiring `Rent Boys' for sex." Oscar lost the libel suit and was then convicted on the Rent-Boy rap.
Jeffery writes: "To penetrate the sanctuary hidden by 7 veils, then, is to gain a kind of mystical binocular vision: behind the Mar Saba text lies yet another narrative, with another Martyr, another example of heterosexual morality revealed as profoundly immoral - even another writer accused of having his way with other people's texts." In this quote Jeffery neatly conflates the 3 Principals: Jesus, Oscar Wilde, and Morton Smith - all Gay, and all Martyrs, and all responsible for Gospels.
Click 12 to clear the mind of Rent Boys.
Salomé was finally produced in England in 1918 and became quickly embroiled in "wartime paranoia." Brit MPs demanded that the 47,000 Ticket buyers be investigated as Traitors and possible German Agents and that they belonged to a "Cult of the Clitoris." A very strange charge.
The most Jarring element of the 2nd Passage from the Secret Gospel of Mark is the implied Misogynistic Message: 3 Women come to Jesus with an urgent need to see the Redeemer. Jesus refuses to even meet with them. Why? Is he feeling guilty about buggering the Yoot, whose Sister et al now demand to confront him? Or is he sending us a message in the Gospel which tries to put women in their place, or worse, a message which implies that Women are not worthy of his attention, and by extension, any Christian Male's attention. How Uranian. How positively Uranian! Jeffery comments: "Only Jesus is pure, for he has not defiled himself with women (Revelation 14:4). Refusing to have anything to do with Salome and all her sex, he loves a man in the dark of night - something that only the initiated will understand. To find our way into the innermost sanctuary, PAST THE SEVEN VEILS, is to find conventional heterosexual morality turned inside out: a sanctimonious Christian condemns the carnality of the Carpocratians, invoking an ideal of male-female attraction that, once UNVEILED, turns out to be nothing but violence and revolting depravity." Peter is bringing it all home in this quote. He alludes to the Biblical Fact that the High Sanctuary of the Jewish Temple hid its Ultimate Secret behind 7 Veils - a key Fact around which Morton Smith organizes his entire Bogey. The Mar Saba Forgery - the skeptical Etics claim - has, as its Literary Core, it's Prime Image, the Metaphor of the 7 Veils. The Mar Saba Ms - like Wilde's Play - has a structure which swings pendulaically between the Poles of Covering - Uncovering. Hiding - Finding. The Picture as a Whole: A Morally bankrupt Anti-Homosexual Church, refusing to face the True Gospel of Christianity where Heterosexual love is inferior to the "Secret" love of men for men, who, like Christ, reject women. The whole affair is so damn Steganographic - all those Other Meanings hiding in plain site by being Veiled as Ordinary Things.
"It was in this sort of environment that the Mar Saba text was written: a period when an established Christian polemic against homosexuality was confronted by a culture of opposition that revered Oscar Wilde in almost-serious religious terms." Very serious Religious terms: Oscar Wilde was seen by the Uranian Community as their St. Michael the Archangel, the Guardian of "His" people.
Click 12 to watch "The Drop."
Smith turns the Secret Gospel's Salome into Wilde's Salomé "by slyly building on a (misinterpreted) ancient hint that Salome tempted Jesus - a conscientious objector in the battle of the sexes that destroyed his cousin John." So it's Jesus & Christianity She dances to reveal . . .
Pete's Summary: "This Salome's confrontation with a pederastic Jesus was packaged as a long-suppressed excerpt from the earliest gospel, together with a story of a young man seeking Jesus' love and finding `the Kingdom of God.' This package, in turn, was a `lost' ancient letter by a stereotypically bigoted heterosexual churchman, a hypocrite who advocates lying in the name of the church, who is shown trying unsuccessfully to hide and distort the embarrassing `Truth' that homosexuality was the religion of Jesus himself." Morton Smith had Balls the size of Offshore Islands dedicated to Archangels who protect their own.
Roll on This to see Ibeca's Poster for her Film on Kenny La Roch. Click on This to see her Trailer.
Click on this to see a Map of Marazion which is oddly Self-Reflective of its Age.
Click on this to Lift the Veil which bit Morton Smith in his Privates.
Click on Motorcycle Girl to get to Mount Sutra in The Speed Limit in America
Click on This to get to the Penultimate Page of this Mission: ApokataInstallation